What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [60]
It is important to recognize that this doctrine is not universal. The rituals that submissive baboons go through in the presence of an alpha, that is, dominant, male, the trouble Americans have discerning whether a Japanese is furious, the subtle way in which one Englishman cuts another to the core, all testify to the fact that the expression of anger is malleable. Time and place and custom enormously influence whether it is a virtue to show naked anger or a virtue to hide it. Our “ventilationist” view is no more than a fashion, a fashion that has several sources: a reaction to the global censoring of emotion by Victorian society, the social homogenization of American life urging us to “get down to the nitty-gritty,” and the Electronic Age taste for headlines and sound bites, allowing us to dispense with the mannerly and time-consuming rituals of masked emotions.
So anger helps us defend threatened territory—it is just, and it is honest. Not only that—it is healthy. It is widely believed that bottling up anger can kill us, slowly and in three different ways.
First, if we suppress our anger, it turns inward against us. Anger turned against the self produces self-loathing, depression, and, ultimately, true self-destruction in the form of suicide.
Second, anger bottled up produces high blood pressure and heart disease. So compelling is this theory that we can almost feel it at work. Imagine yourself insulted by someone you hate. Force yourself to take it and remain in this uncomfortable state. Grit your teeth, clench your fists, go red in the face. You can almost feel your blood pressure surge. Indeed, in experimental studies, blood pressure subsides faster after insult when you retaliate against the person who insulted you. In field studies, the Type A personality—hostile, competitive, and time-urgent—has more heart attacks than the more relaxed Type Bs do.3
Finally, anger suppressed is said to cause cancer. There is a “cancer-prone personality,” a Type C. Type C people control their emotional reactions because they believe that it’s useless to express their needs. They do not express anger, but suffer silently and stoically; they do not kick against cruel fate. Type C women, particularly, have a higher rate of malignant breast cancer than do women who express their emotions.4 Moreover, when women with malignant breast cancer receive psychotherapy in which they are encouraged to ventilate their emotions, they live for somewhat longer periods.5 No wonder we have become a people who anger easily. We protest, we shout, we litigate. We do not suffer trespass stoically. The heroes of many of our movies are Rockys, Rambos, and Dirty Harrys who explode violently: “Go ahead, make my day.”
Anger is the effective defense of what belongs to us, the springboard to justice, the emblem of honesty, the path to rosy health. What a splendid emotion!
The Pros of Anger Revisited
Not so fast. In spite of anger being so deeply enshrined in our culture, many of its virtues are myths based on Freudian ideology or on distortions of evidence.
Anger: the unhealthy emotion. Is it true that anger unexpressed leads to more cancer, more heart disease, and more depression?
Cancer. The evidence that suppression of anger leads to cancer is very weak. The Type C personality, allegedly a predisposer to cancer, is made up of several characteristics confounded with one another. The Type C woman, for instance, fails to express her anger. But she is also more helpless and hopeless, has more anxiety and more depression, is more fatalistic, and has little fighting spirit. Which of these is the active ingredient? Lack of anger expression is one possibility, but hopelessness, helplessness, and depression are more likely to be the real culprits. Each of these last three has been linked to tumor growth, but anger suppression has not. Indeed, the inventors of Type C theory also found that “exploders,” people who have frequent outbursts of temper, also have more cancer than normal people.6 Examining the cancer evidence, I cannot determine